I wasn't sure about this. And I'm not sure about this review, but I'm just going to start writing and we'll see what comes out the other side.

I was doing my usual fast grab from the library because I only had one book on-deck at home and I hate that feeling. It was technically the middle of a workday, so I was end-capping it-- I find the good people at my local library will put interesting things on the end caps of aisles and it's worth grabbing one or four. I skimmed the first couple paragraphs of the jacket and it said this was a book about supervillains with Excel skills. Don't have to tell me twice!

So I started it and it worked-- a surprisingly smooth blend of Superhero-ChickLit, sub-genres: Sympathetic Villains plus BFFs and Office Politics. Walschots doesn't waste words and the ones she chooses are finely-tuned. Anna and June were immediately clearly in my mind. Which was absolutely necessary, because Anna gets it early on when she takes a temp job that should be easy money-- stand behind this one villain during a press conference. The Superhero, Supercollider, arrives, though, and instead of just going for the Bad Guy, he does what is apparently his and/or the thing: get the Bad Guy while causing as much collateral damage as possible, damn the consequences, the hell with any other people that might be nearby, working a temp job (or, as we'll eventually find out, just mind their own businesses). Anna is hospitalized with a limb-and-life threatening injury. The course of her long recovery is where the Excel skills start to make a difference.

In hindsight, the skills are mentioned cursorily. We never really get to know how Anna got them, how she uses them, what they actually cost her. We just know that she sees a nugget and pursues it mathematically-- what is the actual cost, in both dollars and life years, of Supercollider's actions and those of all the heroes like him. We know she's smart and does this well and voila, she goes from unemployed with no prospects and couch surfing to fully employed by The Supervillain, Leviathan, who's running a well-oiled machine of evil with a choice executive benefits package. Anna's job becomes something like Head of Data Viz. She hires a team and starts working on a very successful first project-- save time, money, and lives by making a low-level hero ruin himself. This, then, is the conceit for the rest of the novel. How to make Supercollider implode?

There is a chunk of the book, then, that is a sort of limbo. Half the staff of Leviathan Enterprises (for lack of an actual name given that I can remember) are individuals referred to with plural pronouns they/them/their, which is distracting as hell. Darla picked up their phone. Yeah. Prose that had been zipping along screeched to a halt while all us old people who still believe in parallelism because we remember sitting in Dr. Cowan's office getting the What For about it stopped to sort out antecedents. Then, that sorta faded into the background while Anna seemingly became The World's Best Manager. Perhaps this isn't or wouldn't be noticeable to others, but some of the wildest sci-fi here is just how GREAT a boss Anna is with little to no apparent experience as a people leader. I started to think that at any minute I was going to turn the page and read a clever vignette combining supervillainy performance management best practices for annual review. I didn't, but it seemed a near thing. June gets lost, as such must so that Anna has no fallback, but the Office Chicklit vibe sticks the rest of the book. It's solid. Just very unexpected. So props for genre blending.

And then it gets good. I've been fairly detailed to this point, but I am going to back way off at this point, because not only could I not do the details justice, the twists are most of the fun. Leviathan, Chief Supervillain, declares that Anna's techniques are successful enough and her data is clear enough that it's time to take on SuperCollider. So they do. BOOM. Many, many booms later and holy crap. The last forty page is one long DUDE WAIT WHAT?! Some of it was actually a little difficult to read, because hell hath no fury like a superhero scorned while being supported by a supervillain. "Those of you who do no want to be turned into a human asshole!" "They dropped what was now a slimy potato." Just. It works, but it's legit hard to read at points. Props.

And then it ends well. Not quite the soaring strings but in a minor villain key I anticipated, but well. And looking at the top of this page, I see there is a #1, so perhaps there will be more data viz and some soaring strings. I'll keep my eyes peeled. And since this has been, to this point, wholly stream of consciousness, I'll just say that that brings my mind back to the potato imagery and nope!

Don't know what the sequel is about, but I'll say, on a personal note, that I hope we get more Quantum. She's the gray area character-- and potato maker yiiiiikes-- and there was a moment, near the end, where I bonded with her. "You never have to hold him up again," Anna tells her while she tells herself the same thing. Or something like that. And yes. I think Walschots is much younger than I am, but she knows something. She knows anger that's not hot or loud. It's cold, calm, and implacable. It shows up for a couple chapters and then is just gone. But those chapters speak.

And... that's it. Give it a shot! Perhaps schedule the end read so you're not eating. Enjoy!